


And There They Kept Him

by SegaBarrett



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Captivity, Flashbacks, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:34:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21928303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Jesse needs to go back.
Kudos: 15





	And There They Kept Him

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ironlawyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/gifts).



> A/N: To my recipient - I started writing this in response to your request for post-canon Jesse like, 2 years ago. I hope you still want it :)

He was standing on the edge, waiting for something to come and take him back down, down. 

He had promised himself that he would never set foot in the compound again, that for the rest of his life he would be free. He would feel the wind on his face and he would stretch his arms out and feel every vertebrae roll back, unhindered by chains. It seemed like silly things to be thankful for, now, things he had always taken for granted in the days before. 

He felt bigger now, standing in front of what had seemed so vast when he had been imprisoned here. 

It had been his whole world, after all. But where did he start, now? 

Where could he find another needle in a haystack?

***

A crack of light shone through the tarp, and Jesse could only just glimpse it. It seemed like it had been days since anyone had climbed down the ladder and fed him.

Maybe it was all in his head. Maybe he had died months ago and this was something playing against his mind, in a dream, over and over again.

Maybe he had never even left the desert and this was the way that his brain liked to torment him, by creating the worst possible hell for him.

“Hello?” Jesse called. What if no one ever came for him again? What was his plan then, slowly fade away and fall off into a skeleton, get trapped inside here and wait until all of his air got cut off? Wasn’t there a story that ended that way, with the air and the light going out of the sky? 

He was more confused with the fact that it didn’t fill him with the terror that it should have. Once, he had worried most of his day about the possibility that he and Mr. White would end up dead. Now, it seemed like there had been all of those missed moments Mr. White had told him about – the right times to die. 

He had thought about escape the first week; hell, he had even tried. Then the resistance had gone and he had been listless and compliant ever since.

It was just easier that way. He even grew to expect them in the way. Not hope for them, not that yet, though it was probably coming (Stockholm Syndrome – Jesse’s mind reminded him of the term, where had he learned that?). 

And now they were gone and it felt even emptier than the horrible days that they were there and ever-present. Because if they died… if they died and he was left here… Jesse wanted to burst into tears just thinking about it, just picturing that. How would he know if he could ever climb up again, ever risk running again?

He couldn’t, not after what had happened the last time. He would never permit himself to make that mistake again. Instead he would let himself stay here and wither away, do his penance. It was what he deserved, after all, right? To be “the bad guy”? He just had to sit and wait because it might all be a trick, to see how long it would take before he tried to run again, just so they could punish him again, and again, and again. 

Jesse began to pace, something that was much harder with chains tying his limbs together. He wanted to shake them free, get the feeling back into them, to know what that felt like again. He knew it would hurt, but wasn’t that what life was anymore? Pain, simply interspersed with other pain, despair, and anxiety creeping up his chest. After all, he was always being watched.

“Rat? You down there?” came a voice from up above – Uncle Jack. The voice was unmistakable. Jesse bit his lip, hard, to keep from screaming something back, anything. It was better to just step back and let everything happen, to give it up and not care about what happened. “Rat?” he called again. Jesse acted as if he no longer knew how to speak. 

He didn’t know what to say back, anyway – maybe a cry of relief that he hadn’t been left to rot, that the men upstairs watching him like he was a fish in a tank hadn’t forgotten about him when the novelty had worn thin.

“You okay in there?”

Was it fear that Jesse heard in Jack’s voice?

Fear of what, exactly? That their cash cow had kicked it in the end? What did they want him for, anyway? Just so Todd could have a chance with Lydia? 

Forget buying your nephew a baseball glove, just get him a meth slave and the girls will come running…

Jesse snorted. This was what his life had come to these days, and that seemed to be the outlook on the horizon for the rest of what would probably be a very short life.

“Yeah,” he managed, as his brain, unbidden, sang out a song he had known in childhood – Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, had a wife but couldn’t keep her…

“You gotta get up in the lab and get to work.”

Jesse wondered where Todd was. Jack didn’t usually bother with the day-to-day; he thought he was too good for that.

Put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her, very well…

If Todd had tired of his pumpkin-shell wife, then things were probably going to get very, very bad for Jesse. He sighed against his chest and watched as the ladder was dropped down to him. 

But maybe it was time for it to be over. Maybe it was time for Jesse to finally be able to sleep. He almost welcomed in – he let the fear get taped down, let himself take it deep into his body and hide it in his bones.

He climbed up the ladder and looked around. Everything smelled like dirt around here. 

“Well, put some pep in your step, rat.”

When he had arrived at the lab, Jack looked over his shoulder – Jesse couldn’t tell quite what he was looking at. 

“Go in and get started. You know what to do.”

The man walked away, Jesse watching as his coat waved in the wind. 

When he came back to the lab later, his hands were full of stacks of money.

***

Todd’s hiding place had been his bizarre pastel apartment, but Jack’s had to have been here at the compound. Maybe Jack looked at this place as his home; hell, maybe he didn’t even have a home otherwise, Jesse didn’t know.

The man didn’t seem to have a persona apart from the one he projected when he was strutting like a peacock all around the compound. The big man in a small pond, a very small pond.

Where would he put his finances? He definitely wouldn’t put it in a bank, probably didn’t trust them not to be filled with inferior people or however he looked at life from day to day.

He would keep it close to home, near someone that he trusted. Kenny, maybe? But Kenny was the same mystery that Jack was.

Jesse should know more, after all of it.

He’d been right up against them, within spitting distance of them. He should know all their routines, all of their hiding places. Otherwise, it had been all for nothing, hadn’t it been?

Andrea was gone, and it was all for nothing if he couldn’t come back and do this last, little good thing.

He began to walk through the clubhouse, imagining them each sprouted up, alive again. It should have been terrifying but it oddly, somehow, made the place feel less lonely. How messed up was that, really? How broken was he, if you cut deep enough?

Were there ghosts in this place? It had all been so sudden – they had been dropping like flies and Jesse had just heard the thumps all around him, the bullets flying around and hitting them. The sounds of death.

It had been more detached than the time in Mexico when everyone had been poisoned, and he hadn’t been able to see this time. No one was running this time.

It was just Todd left, and then he had – no, he wasn’t going to think about that, he wasn’t going to occupy one more square foot of thought in his mind.

He wasn’t worth it.

And once he opened that door, Todd would never leave.

***

“Get into the lab. I don’t feel like looking at you.”

Jesse could relate; he was tired of looking at himself, too. He didn’t need Jack to tell him how sorry he looked. If he could go away, he would. If he could just sink into the floor and melt away, he would.

But he couldn’t. This was where he was, and this is where he always would be.

He shuffled into the lab and began to work. He could turn it off, now, run it in the background. 

It was better when he didn’t let himself get too far into certain parts of his head. The parts that thought about what Brock must be doing right now, the part that thought about Andrea and Jane. The part that was always raw and broken open.

Instead, he thought of making the same box over and over again, rubbing the edges down and letting himself feel as if he had created something beautiful. Maybe that had been his perfect moment, the way that Mr. White had talked about it, the moment when he had been a good person for once.

They liked to try to break him of that concentration when they could, but after awhile they just got tired of it and left him well enough alone. They had their own games they liked to play amongst themselves, and after Jesse stopped reacting they didn’t find him nearly so much fun.

The fight had gone out of him. He was just waiting to die.

***

The place was filthy and huge. Jesse could look around it a hundred times and never find out where Jack had hid his stash, if this was even where it was. It was a waste; he had come back and he was going to get caught and it was going to have all been for nothing because there was nothing to find except for ghosts and pain and blood.

Brock was going to die in some hospital because he couldn’t afford his damned operation. 

If Andrea had still been alive… If Jesse had still been giving her money… Then he could have done something. He could have figured out something, or he could at least have been in the hospital next to his bed.

But you weren’t before… You were plotting to bomb a nursing home.

Jesse had always gotten it all wrong, again and again.

***

One day they sat around watching a movie called Wait Until Dark.

It was an old movie, with Audrey Hepburn in it. Jesse recognized her because his aunt used to watch her movies sometimes – My Fair Lady had been her favorite, though she had chuffed sometimes about Audrey not doing her own singing. She still watched it again and again anyway, though.

In the movie’s climax, the evil villain ran around, menacing a blind woman with a match, but she could be two steps ahead sometimes.

Jesse twitched as they watched it, edgy and wanting to run but knowing not to do anything that they hadn’t commanded. They got mad when he did things they didn’t want him to do.

They kept laughing as the man chased the woman around, like it was the funniest movie that they had ever seen in their lives. All except for Todd – Todd wasn’t someone who laughed at things. He was just someone who stared and smiled amiably no matter what was happening in front of him.

“It was in…” the woman declared on the TV, “the washing machine!”

She pulled it out and he began to chase her again. Jesse must have slumped over against Todd, from the exhaustion, before he found out how the movie ended. When he woke up again he was back in the grate, back in his thin little mattress and the blanket that was never enough.

Back in Hell.

***

The woman’s voice rang through his ears now, wild and triumphant, as he ran to the little shed in which they kept the appliances which they so rarely used. Most of just wore the same stuff day to day without much care. 

But something in it made sense. Something in him remembered Jack howling with laughter at that damn movie, right along with Kenny, slapping his knee because to him the whole thing was just so damn funny.

Sometimes Jesse could overthink things, he realized. There was no grand hiding place. There was only what Jack – or, hell, maybe it had been Kenny – had found novel or amusing in the moment.

He flipped over the top and look down into a stack of dollar bills that threatened to spill out of the top. It felt like more money than he had ever seen in his life.

It would pay for Brock’s aftercare, for his school. For Christmas presents, for a nice warm winter jacket.

For a life.

Jesse knew that it was blood money, but for once he couldn’t imagine throwing this away. He began to take each stack and spread his fingers across it, counting it, as if it couldn’t be real. As if he was still in the cage and this had all been some pipe dream he had had, sleep deprived and living off of fumes and heady from the smell of meth all of the time. 

The bag was heavy against his arms as he ran. He thought he would never have to never have to look at that place ever again.

Except in his dreams. And he would keep them far away from Brock.

He would give Brock a life.

And he would live one.


End file.
